Original Alamo church may be at this site
A report on the burial locations in the 1720s points to an area under today’s federal building in a corner of the plaza
SAN ANTONIO — Experts believe they’ve discovered the location of the first church and cemetery of the mission that became the Alamo.
A draft report seeking to pinpoint possible boundaries of cemeteries at the Alamo suggests the first mission church at the site was on the north end of the cityowed plaza, at the southeast corner of the Hipolito F. Garcia Federal Building.
Archaeologists have known of at least three church sites at the Mission San Antonio de Valero, the first permanent local mission which became a Spanish military outpost and the site of an 1836 siege and battle for Texas independence. An archival investigation seeking to locate burials in Alamo Plaza now theorizes a fourth site, the mission’s original church of the 1720s, was in the area of the federal building.
The report, which examines mission-era burial practices and synthesizes all known data on burial records and discoveries of human remains since the mid-1800s, will be publicly released when completed. Officials have not given a timeline. The report is being prepared by the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio as part of a nearly $400 million, public-private makeover of Alamo Plaza that includes a museum and visitor center.
It’s also likely there was a cemetery in the area near that first church, close to narrow canals known as acequias that provided water from the San Antonio River to the mission, Clint McKenzie, staff archaeologist with the UTSA center, recently told members of the Alamo Citizens Advisory Committee.
“That campo santo would have to have been near the church, adjacent to the church, and it would’ve been limited in its extent because of the acequias that ran around it,” McKenzie said in a recorded virtual briefing last month that can be viewed on the city’s YouTube channel.
An early clue about the first church and cemetery may have been left in 1764 by local soldier and rancher Luis Antonio Menchaca, whose map of San Antonio showed an area marked with a cross on the north side of the mission.
The 1935 discovery of a cluster of burials at what now is the southeast corner of the federal building suggests there were “burials packed beneath a church floor,” McKenzie said. The Spanish-Indigenous missions also were known to place burials near church structures.
“This is one of the reasons why we think that first church was in this particular area — not necessarily this particular footprint but nearby,” he told the committee.
Experts have said the early mission likely had a church made of timber or adobe before the limestone church that still stands was completed in the mid-1700s. According to the draft report, the first church would have been used from 1724-1727. Archaeologists have documented use of a north room of the Convento/ Long Barrack as a church from 1728-1749. The third location, the stone church, was used from 1749 to 1750, when its roof collapsed. Worship activities in the fourth location, a north room of the stone church known as the sacristy, occurred from 1750 to 1793, when the mission was secularized.
“What we can say is that this review suggests that burials of clothed or shrouded bodies were made within the subfloors of those four churches, as well as the campo santos associated with those churches,” McKenzie said.
At least 1,200 people are believed to have been buried under church floors or in cemeteries at the mission, with many having died from cholera and other epidemics. But McKenzie said there appears to be a separate set of burial records for the Puebla de Valero — the community that existed after the mission and until about 1808, when its occupation as an outpost had begun. By then, many people were being buried at a new campo santo, west of the river and San Pedro Creek, in the area of today’s Santa Rosa Hospital.
Ramón Vásquez, an executive member of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation and member of the advisory committee, said the report begins to answer questions that have long lingered about the site.
“It was well overdue, and it’s never been done in the history of the Alamo,” Vásquez said.